One Battle After Another (in theaters)

“One Battle After Another” is such a grand, sweeping, emotional story that it’s hard not to overlook the bits where it doesn’t quite work. 

Loosely based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, the movie brings the novel’s original story of counter-revolutionaries into our day. There are noble fights, freeing immigrants from detention centers, and less noble fights as people wrestle with the aftermath of their own choices. It says a lot about our times, a far more dramatic version of the struggle we all face, but at its heart it’s the story of a father trying to reconnect with his daughter. It’s funny, heartbreaking, scary, and as dramatic as any superhero epic. It’s nearly three hours long, but it has so much story to tell it feels like just the right amount of time. 

It’s also got plot threads that wander far too close to the ridiculous, but not successfully enough to count as parody. There’s also a troubling theme that it always seems to be a member of a minority that ends up betraying someone, and the fact that a scene of coerced sex ends up putting a lot of blame on the victim. 

The movie opens with the revolutionary group in their heyday, then fast forwards to 16 years later when Leonardo DiCaprio’s former revolutionary is a pathetic old man raising a teenage daughter. When their past comes back to haunt him, however, he has to remember how to fight if he wants any chance of getting his daughter back. 

The cast is fantastic, particularly Teyana Taylor and debuting actress Chase Infiniti. Together, they help make the messy, troubling, powerful movie into an epic. 

Grade: Three stars

Him (in theaters)

Don’t let Jordan Peele’s name con you into watching “Him.”

Though his name is attached to all the trailers, Peele wasn’t involved in either the writing or directing of this repetitive fever-dream of a movie. That’s good for Peele, because what starts looking like an interesting concept devolves into a flashy haunted house that grows more and more nonsensical with every moment. The movie bans anything remotely close to subtlety, taking its one good idea and repeatedly hitting you over the head with it. If it wasn’t for Marlon Wayans’ delightfully deranged performance as a murderous mysterious football legend, there wouldn’t be anything here worth watching. 

The movie starts with Cade, a young football hopeful whose promising career gets sidelined by a strange late-night attack. When he gets a call saying football legend Isaiah White (Wayans) wants to train him and hopefully get him recruited to the San Antonio Saviors, it seems like the answer to his prayers. When he gets there, though, he realizes that something much more sinister is going on. 

The movie wants us to see football as a cult that destroys black bodies for the sake of white owners and audiences. It’s a good idea, but the movie communicates this in the most literal, ham-fisted way possible. Then it keeps communicating it over and over again, without bothering with anything like interesting world building or even expanding on the original point. Tyriq Withers isn’t a good enough actor to add weight to any of this, and the ending is absolutely absurd.

In the end, all we can do is hope that someone else takes this idea and makes a better movie out of it. 

Grade: One star

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society and the Utah Film Critics Association. Drop her a line at [email protected].

Credit for photo ©Warner Bros.